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Wyoming is proud of its hydrocarbon history. Image via Wikipedia

Encana Oil & Gas, in a lengthy response today to the EPA's allegations last week of fracking-caused groundwater pollution of a natural gas field in Wyoming, said it strongly disagrees with the agency's conclusions. Encana said that EPA's data from "existing domestic water wells" agrees with earlier tests done by Encana which "shows no impacts from oil and gas development."

Encana criticizes the EPA for releasing its draft report before opening up its findings to third-party analysis.

Some of Encana's criticisms of the EPA's approach are downright funny in their suggestion that the agency bungled not just its testing approach, but the test samples themselves.

The company notes that it "is an entirely expected result" for the EPA to find "components of natural gas" upon drilling two monitoring wells 900 feet down into a natural gas reservoir. At that depth, the monitoring wells go far deeper than the level of water wells used by people in the area (typically 300 feet down) and enter into the gas reservoir zone. So it's no wonder they found gas. "Natural gas developers didn't put the natural gas at the bottom of the EPA's deep monitoring wells, nature did," writes Encana.

Encana also notes the curiosity of EPA detecting man-made chemicals in the "blank" quality control water samples. These blanks are supposed to contain only ultra-purifed water. Finding chemicals in blanks "suggest a more likely connection to what it found is due to the problems associated with EPA methodology int he drilling and sampling of these two wells."

Encana rejects the idea that the poor water quality in the area has to do with recent fracking. It cites U.S. Geological Survey reports from as far back as the 1880s that documented poor water quality in Pavilion. Other USGS reports since 1959 have found the high levels of naturally occurring sulfate and dissolved solids as unsatisfactory for domestic use.

Development of the Pavillion field began back in 1960. Encana acquired the field in 2004 and drilled 44 wells, the last in 2007. The mature field produces 10 million cubic feet of gas a day from 125 wells.

The gas reservoir at Pavillion is as shallow as 1,100 feet and has no cap rock to prevent the gradual upward migration of gas. This unusually shallow gas naturally "pollutes" groundwater. And, says Encana, there is no contiguous water aquifer to move water through the area. This is not shale gas, which is usually found more than five times deeper.

In 2005 Encana told Wyoming that it was evaluating historical production pits it had inherited. It's been remediating those pits ever since. Even though nature made Pavillion's water bad to begin with, the company says it voluntarily began paying for drinking water supplies in 2008 pending further environmental study.